


Scar Tissue

by Jadesfire



Category: Daredevil (TV), The Defenders (Marvel TV)
Genre: Foggy Nelson needs a hug, Gen, Missing Scene, THE DEFENDERS SPOILERS, head canon, shirtless Matt Murdock, these three are the living exemplar of 'it's complicated'
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-12
Updated: 2017-09-12
Packaged: 2018-12-26 22:04:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,053
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12067860
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jadesfire/pseuds/Jadesfire
Summary: "What the hell, Matt?" Foggy supposes that if being dropped on an ancient couch didn't wake Matt up, his voice won't do it, but he's still kind of disappointed when Matt sleeps on.The cops need Matt's shirt. Foggy needs them not to see what's underneath it. And he really needs Matt to wake up.Two out of three isn't bad.





	Scar Tissue

**Author's Note:**

> Because I could not leave the question _"Who changed Matt's shirt in 'Fish in the Jailhouse?"_ (The Defenders, Ep.7) unanswered. 
> 
> With thanks to Blackglass for a super-quick and sharp-eyed beta.
> 
> ~

_It has been said, 'time heals all wounds.' I do not agree. The wounds remain. In time, the mind, protecting its sanity, covers them with scar tissue and the pain lessens. But it is never gone._  
Rose Kennedy

~

They're unconscious when they bring them in.

Well. Sort of.

Luke Cage is out cold, the EMTs giving the cops hard looks when they insist that he stay in the Precinct, not be taken to the hospital, and it's only when Claire steps in with her professional voice on that they begrudgingly agree. Matt and Jessica stir a little when poked (Foggy just tried once, to check) with Matt definitely seeming the worse off of the two of them.

"Put her in interview 4," the lead detective - Knight, Foggy trawls up from his memory - says, nodding for the two patrolmen holding up Jessica to take her inside. Then she turns to Foggy with a scowl. "And you, counselor. You want to take charge of your colleague here?"

Foggy really, really doesn't, but Matt mumbles something under his breath, head still drooping low, and so yes, okay, fine, because they can't have him saying things while he's loopy from whatever the hell happened to them.

There's a spare office near the interview rooms, and the cops dump Matt none-too-gently on the couch, because apparently they heard he's a lawyer. Or something. Maybe Matt's just heavier than he looks. They lean over him, checking he can breathe, shoving his cracked glasses into his hand, and leave with only mild glares in Foggy's direction. Once he's flat on his back, it's like someone's given Matt permission to pass out properly, because he goes limp, one hand dangling out to his side. His coat goes on the desk and the two of them are alone for a second.

"What the hell, Matt?" Foggy supposes that if being dropped on an ancient couch didn't wake Matt up, his voice won't do it, but he's still kind of disappointed when Matt sleeps on.

In the corridor, Knight is talking to one of the cops who brought the three of them in, both of them glancing through the window in a way that does not bode well for Matt's future. Movement from the other direction catches Foggy's eye, and he turns to see Karen hovering at the edge of the window, not wanting to get too close to the cops who are blocking the doorway. 

After another few seconds of conference, Knight gestures for Karen to follow, stepping into the office and closing the door behind them.

"Look," she says, and it doesn't sound as pissed as Foggy had expected, so maybe this is going to go okay after all. "We have a problem." Or not.

"Just one?" Karen says, immediately pressing her hand over her mouth as though trying to keep more words back.

Knight snorts. "Well, one that you can deal with anyway. There was a body in the room where we found them. Stabbed in the heart. Another one downstairs without a head." Karen makes a tiny noise of distress and Foggy reaches out automatically, his hand gripping her arm. She puts her hand over his. Knight shrugs. "Yeah, I know. There was something weird in the air. Incense or something. We think that's what knocked out your friends."

"He didn't hit his head?" Foggy says, glancing down at Matt, whose fingers are twitching in mid-air.

"Who the hell knows." Despite the words and the obvious frustration, Foggy thinks the detective is trying to be kind. For now. "We're hoping they'll wake up and be able to tell us. Luke is out cold, and they don't know when he'll wake up. According to her sister, Jessica can take a hit, and we're expecting her to recover first, but as for your friend." She glances down, shrugs. "We really need to know what he knows, as soon as he's awake."

Foggy has worked around cops enough that he knows withholding when he hears it. "So what's the problem?" he asks.

Still looking at Matt, Knight's mouth twists in the grimace of someone about to deliver unwanted news. "We need his shirt." When Foggy and Karen just stare at her, she goes on, "There were sprays of blood everywhere in the room, and he must have got close enough to get it on him. That makes his shirt evidence from the crime scene. Enough people have been near him that it's already contaminated to hell and back. Even so, if he were awake, I'd be handing him a plastic suit. But."

But as he's unconscious from who-knows-what, I'm prepared to cut him some slack, her silence says. Just this once.

Letting go of Karen's arm, Foggy shifts a little closer, into Knight's field of vision. "We'll do it," he says. "Do you have something non-plastic he can wear in the meantime?"

Knight gives him an odd look. "You undress many unconscious people in your line of work, counselor?" she asks.

"We roomed together in Law School," Foggy says, as blank as he can make it. "I think I'll cope. And we should get Claire Temple to look him over." He's careful to use her full name, because Claire is one of his clients' partners, not his co-conspirator.

There's a moment of silence as Knight thinks about this. It helps that Matt's still out cold, his glasses clutched in the hand that's resting on his chest. With his other arm flung wide, and face at rest, he looks years younger than he is and twice as vulnerable.

"Fine." Turning, Knight heads back into the corridor. "I'll see what I can find."

"Do you want me to go get Claire?" Karen asks, as Foggy drops the blinds, shielding them from the corridor.

"No, Luke needs her right now. We got this." Glancing over his shoulder, because he'd spoken without really thinking, Foggy catches Karen's eye. "Unless. I mean, if you'd rather."

"No." The word comes out too fast, which Karen seems to realise, because she catches herself, shakes her head, just a little. "No, it's fine."

Once the last blind is closed, Foggy leans down and gently tugs the glasses out of Matt's hand. By some miracle, the cracked glass stays inside the frame. He passes them to Karen, who puts them on the table behind her. 

"Okay," Foggy says. "I'll lift, you pull." 

That gets a small, humourless laugh from Karen, who comes to sit behind Matt on the couch as Foggy sits in front of him, tugging him into a sitting position. Together, they get his forehead resting on Foggy's shoulder, and Karen starts to ease the jacket off. Foggy has to shift his grip when she gets to Matt's elbows, wrapping his arms around Matt's shoulders so that Karen can pull without dragging Matt right off the couch. The blood has mostly dried by now, so Foggy's not too worried about getting it on him. And after all, it could be worse. It could be Matt's blood. And hey, look, he actually managed to come with a situation worse than this. Who knew that was even possible?

The right cuff gets caught on Matt's shirt sleeve buttons, and it takes Karen a moment to untangle them. Once she's got it free, she takes the jacket over to the desk on the other side of the room, sitting it carefully over the back of the chair, and straightening it out, like she's trying to avoid creasing it.

"Okay," Foggy says. "Take his head?"

They lay him back down again, still only the tiny twitches in his right hand indicating that Matt's alive in there. He's even breathing quietly.

His tie is long gone, probably already in an evidence bag somewhere, but Foggy grabs Karen's wrist when she goes to undo the next button on his shirt.

"Not yet," he says, keeping his voice low. "Let's wait and see what Detective Knight can find for us."

Karen gives him an odd look, wanting to ask but holding back, and settles on the floor instead. After a second, she takes Matt's hand in both of hers, stilling the twitches.

"He looks like he's trying to find his cane," she says. "Do you know if they brought that in too?"

Foggy shakes his head. "He goes through those things like they're packets of gum," he says. "Probably ditched it somewhere before-" he hesitates. It's not like he knows what was going on before. He only ever gets the aftermath. "-whatever happened, happened," he finishes. 

While they're waiting, he runs a hand over Matt's head, checking for new bumps and lumps. There must be a tender spot somewhere, because at one point Matt's free hand twitches, and Karen looks up suddenly, apparently startled by movement in the hand she's holding. But there's no give to Matt's skull, and no lump there yet, so Foggy figures it's probably just another bruise for the collection.

He's just starting to wonder if he's going to have to donate his own shirt to the cause, when the door opens and a cop he doesn't recognise sticks his head in, looking between the two of them. 

"Nelson?" At Foggy's nod, he holds up the packages in his hands. "Detective Knight said that this is for your friend." Blue t-shirt, right hand. "And that this is for his shirt." Evidence bag, left hand. The cop folds them together, and even in the semi-darkness and without super-senses, Foggy catches them both easily.

"Thanks," he says, aware they make a weird tableau, with him pushed up against Matt's legs on the couch, and Karen gripping Matt's hand from the floor. "We'll bring it along in a minute."

Once the cop is gone, Foggy takes a deep breath. Lying to the cops was the easy part. Reaching out, he pulls Matt's hand out of Karen's grip, passing her the t-shirt and bag. 

"I hate doing this to you, buddy," he says, unbuttoning Matt's cuff. "But better us than them."

Karen's unfolding the t-shirt, and she chokes a little when it's flattened out, the NYPD logo garishly yellow in the darkness. It's easier, saying this while she's looking away, and while Foggy can focus on fussing with Matt's other cuff buttons. Because he does kind of need to know. She deserves a warning, if she needs one.

"You guys went on a few dates, right?" he asks, and in his peripheral vision, Karen sits up a little straighter, looking over at him.

"One," she says, and as though catching on - although she really, really isn't - she draws in a deep breath. "He didn't come up. It was- It was a perfect night." The words are definitely a quote, and Foggy is glad he has something else to think about.

"In that case," he says, starting on the first shirt button, "I'm going to need you not to freak out at this point." Because it will be a surprise to her. Because he doubts things have improved since the last time he saw Matt without his shirt, last year, when Matt had tried to argue that a gunshot to the head was nothing to stress about.

Foggy had expected more of a reaction from Karen as he undoes the last button, pushing Matt's shirt open. The silence, her cool, assessing look, is definitely worse than shock. Instead of freaking out, Karen purses her lips, blows out a long breath, and coolly kneels up to help pull the shirt off the arm nearest her.

There are new scars, some on his arms, one that Foggy can feel on his back as he lifts Matt to free his shirt. The ones on his front are still terrible, almost worse for being symmetrical, two above his hips, two higher up, just below his shoulders. Matt could probably tell him the latin names of each muscle. Foggy just knows how much it looks like they hurt.

Matt stirs, just a little, probably cold from the terrible AC in the precinct, drawing in a deeper breath, the long scar over his right hip pulling towards the defined muscles of his stomach, which are suddenly in sharp relief as he moves. The scar is deep enough - high enough? What's the right word for scars? - that it casts a shadow on Matt's skin in the slice of light from the blinds.

"Let's get that t-shirt on him," Foggy says, pulling fast at the other sleeve and not worrying about jogging Matt too much as it comes off. The rest of the scars are more faded than he'd remembered, more visible than he'd hoped, but Karen seems to be coping okay. 

Or not, because as they pull Matt upright again, Karen bunches up the t-shirt to get it over his head, which is uncooperatively floppy on his neck, and her face is blank and drawn, as though all the emotions have just drained out of it. Foggy knows something about that. 

It's no joke, trying to get a t-shirt on someone who is a) out cold and b) is apparently composed entirely of solid muscle and obstinacy. Foggy's always heard that muscle weighs more than fat, something he's much more inclined to believe when Matt's arm slips and smacks him in the ear hard enough to sting.

Eventually, though, Karen is smoothing the shirt down Matt's back, and if her hands linger longer than need be on the lines on his back, Foggy's not going to judge. He's not even going to look, because he's pulling the shirt down to lie flat at the front. As an afterthought, he glances over at the desk.

"Hang on a sec," he says, letting Matt lean back against Karen for a moment, his head low on his chest. This is just an ordinary office, with an ordinary desk and ordinary pack of supplies, which include, as expected, a pair of scissors in the top drawer.

When he turns back, Matt's head is lying back on Karen's shoulder. His hair is a mess, sticking up at a crazy angle, and his mouth is gaping, his jaw slack. One of Karen's arms is wrapped around his middle, holding him up, while the other, the one nearer Foggy, is supporting Matt's arm, stopping it from falling again. Her arm looks almost comically small against his. She has her chin on his shoulder, their cheeks pressed together, probably to stop his head flopping to the side, and it gives Foggy a good look at her face.

_Screwed up, beaten up and passed out, and Matt Murdock still gets the girl._

The second passes, because yes, no, not this time, and Foggy crosses back to the couch, waving the scissors at Karen. "Here, give him to me."

The last time Matt passed out on Foggy on a couch, they'd just burned their bridges at L&Z, with nothing to look forward to but crushing debt and a broom closet of an office. In fairness, that had pretty much been Foggy's fault, since he'd kept on refilling Matt's whiskey glass without Matt knowing (probably; possibly not; probably not), and they'd both woken up with the hangover from hell and Matt's elbow on the back of Foggy's neck. Improbable though it would have seemed at the time, this is actually worse.

Karen helps him tip Matt forward again, so Foggy can get at the label in the back of the t-shirt's neck. "He hates these things," he says, making sure to snip the stitches not the label itself, so he can pull it all out. "Cuts them out of everything."

He feels as much as sees Karen nod from the way Matt's right shoulder dips and lifts. She's still supporting him, one arm still around his middle, although that has to be hard work by now. 

"That's got it," Foggy says, putting the scissors on the end table behind him. Karen hasn't really moved, her forehead pressed to the back of Matt's shoulder.

"You knew about-" she starts, apparently not wanting to say the actual words aloud.

"Some," Foggy says. "He got some of them the night I found out. Others, he already had." He swallows. He hadn't looked too closely, hadn't trusted himself, but, "I think some are new."

"Of course they are." The breath Karen draws in seems to last forever, and it's as though through it, Foggy can hear her pulling herself back together. The exhale starts, and she pulls her arm free, drawing away from Matt and dragging herself off the couch. "I should take this to the detectives," she says, crouching to stuff Matt's shirt into the evidence bag. "And I'll ask Claire to come by."

"Thanks." Cradling the back of Matt's head with one hand, Foggy leans forward to lie him down again. "He'll be okay, Karen," he says, not looking at her, knowing she'll hear the lie anyway. 

"Right. Sure. I know." She doesn't, any more than he does, and she's doing a worse job of pretending. "I'll just-"

Foggy sits for a long time after she's gone, waiting to see if Matt will stir. Or even if he was faking it. That's not impossible, not with Matt. He wants to hate himself for thinking that when Matt doesn't move, barely even takes a deeper breath, but at this point, he's all out of everything. He's burned out on fear, and although he thinks he may have an endless well of anger when it comes to Matt's terrible life choices, he can't even find the energy to draw on that right now.

"You probably need coffee," he says to Matt's unmoving face. "I know I sure as hell do." It's unnerving, because Matt's always moving, always twitching. Foggy had usually put it down to a side effect of the accident, or maybe just Matt not being aware of what he was doing. Now he has no idea why Matt does it, or why Matt does anything.

No. That's not true. Not knowing isn't the same as not understanding. As not agreeing.

He can hear Claire's voice from down the hall, and he gets to his feet, letting Matt's knees fall to the couch, pulling his body sideways with it.

"I really need you to wake up so I can yell at you," he says. 

Matt doesn't reply.


End file.
